81: Guns
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Dear friend, it's true, if there's even the slightest possibility that you'll have to use your gun someday for self-defense, this is going to be the most important letter you've ever read. I'm not kidding. So please, do yourself a favor. Go to someplace quiet, close the door, and tell everyone not to disturb you for the next five or ten minutes. Done? Good. But only asking that you do this because I want you to carefully absorb and consider what I'm about to share with you. Really could save your life someday. Well, this is an open letter from this issue of American handgun or magazine. It's actually written by Ben Cooley, who's described as somebody with 13 years of experience in counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, and SWAT training. It is a four-page, single-spaced letter with lots of things underlined and bolded everywhere. Sure four-page ad. Let me see. This is basically is that you have to have the fighting mindset. Naturally, you have to have a gun. But in addition to a gun, more important than the gun is what is going on in your head. Just read you a little bit here. How I would get you killed. Tragically, almost everyone alive today learns their so-called fighting skills from what they see on TV and in the movies. I say tragically because everything you see on TV and film is absolutely the opposite of what you should do in a real-life armed confrontation. And yes, I know it's almost heresy to say it, but even Dirty Harry would get his head blown off if he tried these stunts in real life. I've been reading gun magazines and more than anything I've read in any of the issues of any of the gun magazines, this ad completely gets to me. And I've been trying to think about why. And I think the reasons are these. Number one, it's central attitude. It's central thesis is everything you know is wrong. Number two, it says Hollywood is trouble. Number three, it tells you that gadgets and fancy stuff cannot help you. What will help you? The only thing that can help you is the right attitude. Number four, it says that all I need to do is buy a video for $97 and a gun, of course, but mainly a video. And I'm set. I read this and I have to say I want more. I want this. Which is not an easy thing to achieve with an ad because the gap between gun owners and people who don't own guns like myself, that is a vast gap in our country. It's two different cultures. But this ad, I don't know what it's something about it's everything you know is wrong, can do badassery. I get this ad. This ad bridges the gap. And that is also the mission of today's radio program. From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American life distributed by Public Radio International on our class. Today on our program we try to bridge the gap between Americans who love their guns and Americans who hate them. At one of our program, NRA meets NEA. Our own Sarah Val goes out shooting with her dad and a gun that weighs 110 pounds. Back to fists and guns. A gun control advocate, Jeffrey Canada explains the pleasure and power of carrying a gun. Act three, shooter. How somebody goes from victim to perp in one day. Act four, potato potato. What it's like getting shot at. We hear from two people. We drew completely opposite conclusions from the experience. Act five, straw man. I'll talk with a man who has put five dozen illegal guns into the hands of criminals for less money than you made this year. Stay with us. Act one, NRA versus NEA. Sarah Val says that growing up in Oklahoma and Montana, she did not agree with her father about guns. And then one day, back when she was mostly a music critic, running for spin and all sorts of places like that, she tried to cross the cultural chasm that divides the gun haters from the gun lovers in this country. If you were passing by the house where I grew up during my teenage years and it happened to be before election day, you wouldn't have even needed to come inside to see that it was a house divided. You could just look at the Democratic campaign poster in the upstairs window and the Republican one in the downstairs window and see our home for the Civil War battleground it was. I'm not saying who was the Democrat and who was the Republican, my father, or I, but I will tell you that I am not the one who plastered the family truck with National Rifle Association stickers that I have never subscribed to guns and ammo and that Hunter's orange was never my color. About the only thing my father and I agree on is the Constitution, though I'm partial to the first amendment while he's always favored the second.
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